Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. Protecting information is often part of a routine process that is performed within an organization. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth.
Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, in addition to protecting data. For instance, companies often implement migration techniques for moving data to lower cost storage over time and data reduction techniques for reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc. Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset. Along these lines, customers are looking for solutions that not only protect and manage, but also leverage their data. For instance, solutions providing data analysis capabilities, information management, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
Data storage devices, such as magnetic disk drives, optical disk drives, hybrid drives, and solid state drives are used to store data for subsequent retrieval. Such devices can employ data caches, which may include high-speed semiconductor memory chips that enable the devices to rapidly manage the data and commands received from a host computer. Without caching, all read and write commands from the host computer would result in an access to the mass storage medium, such as a magnetic disk. Such access may result in significant time latencies due to mechanical positioning of the head relative to the magnetic disk. By caching, the storage device can buffer data that is likely to be accessed by the host computer so that when the data is actually accessed, the data is made available more quickly.